I might be useful here to take a little detour. Why do people do things? The problem, when it comes to new technologies, is that what people want to do is partly dependent on what they can do.
I had a conversation today with somebody who does not work at all with computers. He said to me “I know people who work with the cutting edge of computers, smart phones and advanced technologies, but don’t we already have everything we need?”
I responded by saying that in the eighteenth century, if you had asked people what they thought about indoor plumbing, most people would not even have heard of such a thing. They were not aware that they were missing anything — because they were not aware that it was even possible.
Similarly, I told him, back when I was in high school, if I was supposed to meet a friend in the park on a Sunday afternoon, and I needed to cancel at the last minute, I would have actually needed to go to the park to tell my friend that I was cancelling.
The important thing here is that I had no idea that this was problematic, and I didn’t feel that I was missing anything. The idea that you could cancel on a rendezvous in the park — without actually going to the park — wasn’t even something that anybody thought about.
We didn’t feel we were missing anything, because alternative possibilities from the future did not yet exist.
And that is what makes it difficult to think about why we might want the Metaverse. How can we feel the lack of something that we have never even experienced?